I am writing in response to a letter by Christopher
Beha '02 (March 12 issue of PAW) in which he expressed disappointment
that President Tilghman invited Dean Hargadon to speak at Baccalaureate
despite his involvement in the admissions fiasco with Yale last fall.

The many opinions concerning how the situation
with Yale should have been handled are irrelevant here. Regardless
of whether people agreed with the actions of the Princeton admission office
last fall, I think most people would agree that Dean Hargardon has had
a huge impact on Princeton (and in a positive way, I feel).

I'm sure President Tilghman had something like that
in mind when she asked him to speak at Baccalaureate. Graduation is not
just a time to honor students; it's a time to honor all who've helped
to make the past four years possible, and Dean Hargadon has played a largely
unsung part in the process for much longer than that. Unfortunately,
we so often choose to honor people when they are leaving us, rather
than when they are around, but later is better than not at all.

And when you get right down to it, wasn't it (at
least partly) his decision that allowed us later classes to be
admitted to Princeton in the first place? I'm not saying that we need
to pay homage for the rest of their lives, but don't kick the
man when he's down.

Re: Christopher
Beha '02's deploring of Fred Hargadon's designation as the 2003 Baccalaureate
speaker, and his suggestion that Dean Hargadon should have been penalized,
where is "In Omnibus Caritas?"

Who among us has led a perfect
life? Here's a man who has been a superb dean of admission for 15 years,
whose subordinates exercised poor judgment and who did what he could to
rectify their mistake. Is our new policy in this community of scholars
to be "one strike and you're out?"

I can't imagine what inspired Christopher
Beha 02's hatchet job on Dean Fred Hargadon (Letters, March
12), but in the future I suggest he temper his brickbats with a healthy
sense of nuance and perspective.

The way I see it, a member of Hargadon's staff suffered
a lapse of judgment and engaged in conduct only barely within the scope
of his employment. Hargadon, a man who has served the university honorably
for many years, was forthright enough to offer a personal apology. Does
Mr. Beha sincerely assert that this makes the dean unfit to close out
his career by addressing students at Baccalaureate?

And while we're on the subject of Baccalaureate, I think
Mr. Beha hyperbolizes just a bit when he claims that the ceremony is "meant
to emphasize the great ethical weight upon the graduates as they enter
the world." Our speaker was humorist Garrison Keilor, and I don't
recall any sort of clamor among my classmates for more emphasis on "ethical
weight."

To Dean Fred: Congratulations on your selection as the
Baccalaureate speaker, and thanks again for the "YES!" letter
back in 97.

I would like to thank you for publishing Christoper
Beha's letter regarding Fred Hargadon. The letter expresses my feelings
exactly. The handling of this matter is truly disgraceful and an affront
to the concept of honor. President Tilghman's continued behavior is inexcusable.
She obviously does not reflect what Mr. Beha and I thought Princeton taught
us.

I would also liek to say that the depth and qualitry
of recent PAW articles have been superb.

With respect to the letter of Christopher
Beha 02, in which he takes exception to honoring Dean Hargadon,
I would like to offer a different perspective.

The Princeton I attended, from August 1957 to June 1962,
not only had no women undergraduates, but the number of Black and Hispanic
students was vanishingly small. As I recall, no one had any aspirations
about having the student body even remotely have representative groupings
or cultures of this country. I only knew, slightly, two black students,
Philip Johnson and Akin Ojo. ( The latters more complex name had
been simplified for folks on this side of the Atlantic  he himself
is a Nigerian, and a professor of electrical engineering in that country,
I believe. )

From the readings in the Alumni Weekly, there
are many highlights of achiev-ments of some very assorted, remarkable
students, and faculty. In athletics, I watched last May the mens
and womens lacrosse teams in the National Finals, or Semi-Finals,
from a hospital bed, following one of several surgeries Ive had
with cancer. I must say, I was impressed by both teams efforts,
the students backgrounds, and how seemingly varied groups exhibited
team cohesion. In short, if Princeton aspires to be in the nations
service, it is reasonable to aim for a heterogeneous Princeton 
quality, but nearly as varied, from many standpoints, as is the nation.

It seems to me that Dean Hargadon is due credit for helping
achieve the student bodies the university has had.

One lapse or oversight cannot erase such a record. Who
would have done even half as well?

It was with a wry smile that I read Christopher
Beha's objection to Dean Hargadon's scheduled Baccalaureate speech
to the class of 2003. His logic is deeply flawed, and so are his conclusions.

Beha's arguments seems to rest on the following premises:

1) Dean Hargadon's involvement in the problems at the
admissions office represents an ethical lapse.

2) Baccalaureate speakers cannot be people who have had
an ethical lapse. It turns out that both his premises are wrong.

First, it seems obvious to me that Dean Hargadon's error
in the admission office affair was a lapse of judgment, not of ethics.
I know that there has been much debate on the subject, but the notion
that Dean Hargadon knowingly did something wrong to provide himself with
such marginal benefit to him is just silly. His offense was an error in
judgment, plain and simple.

Second, even supposing that Dean Hargadon's error qualified
as an ethical lapse, Beha's standard for Baccalaureate speakers is ridiculous
and wholly unsupported by historical evidence. For example, many Baccalaureate
speakers are career politicians, who suffer ethical lapses regularly.
In the interest of civility, I will refrain from listing some of the ethical
failings of specific recent Baccalaureate speakers, but I am prepared
to do so if pressed. I will simply say that compared to these people,
Dean Hargadon's many years of selfless service to the university make
him entirely overqualified in the ethics department.

Finally, I would like to say that
when I graduated in 1997, Dean Hargadon spoke to our class on Class Day.
His speech was thoughtful and touching, and moved some members of our
class to tears. To this day, I remember some of his moral insights, and
I do my best to live by them. If I could have replaced the self-aggrandizing
drivel that passed for a Baccalaureate speech in 1997 with more of Dean
Hargadon's words, I certainly would have done so. Mr. Beha's emotional
response to Dean Hargadon's pending Baccalaureate speech is self-righteous
indignation. My emotional response is jealousy  the Class of 2003
is lucky indeed.

Christopher Beha wrote (March 12) that "...
Dean Hargadon's office embarrassed the university community on a national
level. . . ."

It did, but only because Princeton's administration bent to fashion over
a concern-of-the-month (electronic privacy) and threw its admission people
to the wolves instead of standing up and fighting for them. Had President
Tilghman noted that devices and systems operate as well as they do because
the people who develop and repair them routinely do forbidden things in
the process a lot of us would have cheered.

It was with great disappointment that I learned
that President Tilghman had extended Dean Hargadon an invitation to speak
at baccalaureate. When Dean Hargadon's office embarrassed the entire university
community on a national level by abusing information they had been given
in trust, President Tilghman assured us that everyone involved in the
incident would be disciplined. Not so. Although he made a public apology,
Dean Hargadon was subject to no disciplinary penalty whatsoever. Instead,
a retirement that all in the community knew was already fast approaching
was accelerated. And yet, in allowing an environment in which this abuse
was carried out in such a seemingly unthinking fashion, the sins of omission
on Dean Hargadon's part were considerable.

Now, only a few months later, one of the great honors the university has
it in their power to bestow is being given Dean Hargadon. Given the particular
nature of the baccalaureate (an interfaith ceremony meant to emphasize
the great ethical weight upon the graduates as the enter the world) and
the nature of the offense (a gross failure to recognize an obvious ethical
responsibility), the choice is particularly upsetting.

Last year, when Meg Whitman was chosen to give the baccalaureate speech
after endowing the new undergraduate college, many in my class questioned
the choice. Yet Ms. Whitman has brought nothing but honor to the university
community by her public record. In retrospect, the Class of 2002 could
have done much worse.